Music|Review: The Philharmonic Puts a Young Composer’s Twist on Bruckner

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Review: The Philharmonic Puts a Young Composer’s Twist on Bruckner

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Jaap van Zweden leads the New York Philharmonic in a program of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony and a new work, “Everything Must Go,” by the young composer Conrad Tao.CreditCreditMichelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Conrad Tao, the 24-year-old composer and brilliant pianist, charmingly admitted earlier this year that he didn’t know Bruckner’s sprawling Eighth Symphony when he was asked by the New York Philharmonic to write a short piece as a sort of prelude for it. Yet Mr. Tao emphasized at the time that the proposal enticed him, and that he was eager to get to know the Bruckner.

For months Mr. Tao, immersed himself in Bruckner’s challenging, sometimes mystifying symphony as he worked on his commission. The result, “Everything Must Go,” had its premiere on Thursday at David Geffen Hall. Jaap van Zweden, in his second program as the Philharmonic’s new music director, conducted this teeming, mercurial 11-minute piece as a curtain-raiser to the symphony. Indeed, there was no break between the Tao and Bruckner works.

In a program note, Mr. Tao wrote that he had multiple “starting points” in mind as he composed the piece, including the mystical image of a cathedral gaining sentience as its melts, and the idea of pursuing pleasure as a method of control. It was difficult to detect hints of such elusive imagery in the music. But his vivid description of the piece as a “sound mass undergoing various transformations,” leaving behind “tendrils and residue as it gains and losses appendages,” strongly comported with the piece I heard.

It begins with sustained tones that elide into slides and clusters. Then, bursts of rattling percussion instigate a series of gestures that swell, fracture and break off. The fidgety music goes through shifting states driven by frenzied riffs, or grumbling low strings, or wailing motifs that seem to call out for attention. I could almost imagine certain desperate melodic fragments saying “Listen to me!” and “What do I do next?”

On Thursday, the music built to feverish episodes, thick with swirling strings, writhing riffs and whiplash cracks. Passages of soft, buzzing string tremolos — interlaced with pointillist squiggles and Messiaen-like bird calls — were almost more nerve-racking than the thick demonic eruptions. But the piece eventually lost “appendages,” to borrow Mr. Tao’s word, and thinned out, quizzically, as if turning over the stage to the Bruckner symphony — which, in this context, seemed to pick up from Mr. Tao’s music. The first movement began with subdued sustained tone, with an ominous, questioning, fragmented phrase in low strings underneath.

Mr. van Zweden has made a specialty of Bruckner, and this performance demonstrated the strengths he brings to the task of conducting the monumental Eighth Symphony. In each of its four movements, Bruckner grapples with large-scale elements of form, as if using musical structure to posit larger questions of meaning. Something will happen, then just stop until something else happens as the piece explores another direction, another dimension. Bruckner also fixates on some motif or statement and puts it through a series of sequences, or subjects it to intricate development.

The Bruckner performances that have most moved me emphasize the questions the composer seems to pose. Mr. van Zweden conducted the Eighth Symphony as if he had an answer for every query. Phrase to phrase, episode to episode, everything sounded purposeful. The musical rhetoric of the piece — that is, what leads to what — came through clearly. He certainly drew out the music’s character: the curious mix of Wagnerian surging and symphonic rigor in the Allegro; the weighty, pummeling energy of the Scherzo; the throbbing, melting expressivity of the Adagio; the architectonic grandeur of the finale.

Mr. van Zweden’s general penchant for making everything overly emphatic was the downside here. The last movement, for example, builds inexorably to a late episode of glittering, all-out intensity. But in this performance, Mr. van Zweden had pushed the orchestra to make several earlier episodes equally climactic. So by the time that late passage came, it sounded redundant and ineffective.

To his credit, the performance had visceral intensity and won a long ovation from the audience. And it was a great idea to pair an adventurous young American composer with an august Austrian symphonic master.

The New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats on Friday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Mercurial New Prelude to Bruckner’s Eighth. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe